("It can be sort of ickily onanistiè'), but he seemed to have given Chodorow's ar- guments earnest reflection. "I certainly do not consider it a badge of honor," he said. "I really don't feel like 'Ooh, wow.' I have the privilege of getting guaran- teed space in the paper to say what I think. If someone wants to spend the money, then it's fair, I guess." He added that he took particular issue with only one point in the critique. "I totally un- derstand that he's disappointed in the Kobe Club review, but I can assure you-I can assure him-that it's an ut- terly honest, if ultimately subjective, as- sessment." Bruni promised that he could review future Chodorow projects with "a completely open mind," but that may be moot. Chodorow said that his next res- taurant will have a Pacific Northwest theme, and added that he was offering a trip to Seattle to any employee who blocks Bruni from its premises. The chef David Chang's restaurant, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, happened to be under consideration on the day of the review-ad face-off. Over the phone, Chang said, "I felt like I was reading The Onion. If Chodorow was trying to be funny, it might have been one of the funniest letters ever written. But I'm sure he's dead serious, which made it not so funny." He went on, "There are so many 'I's in that letter-me, me, me. " Chang was thrilled that Ssäm Bar had garnered two stars, but admitted, "If Frank Bruni had poorly reviewed one of my restau- rants, I might have pulled a T onya Har- ding and broken his kneecaps. I'd have thought, Dude, I've gotta do something. But I'd never really do it." -Lauren Collins HIGHER EDUCATION THE NEW BATHROOM WALL M ost of the comments uttered at Harvard after the appointment of its new president, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, are probably lost to history. One exception is a conversation held recently at 12:35 A.M.: Hail to the new president What's her name again. . . DR. FAUST Faust Haus. . . Harvard has made a Faustian bargain, it seems. This exchange took place on bored- atlamont.com (the name refers to the un- dergraduate library at Harvard), a Web site whose original version, strangely, began last year in Butler Library, at Co- lumbia University. Its creator, Jonathan Pappas, was in Butler the other night, explaining the source of his inspiration. "Basically, I was sitting in that room"- he pointed to Room 209, an under- graduate study area-"and I was think- ing, I want to create something to beat my boredom," he said. Using his lap- top and the school's wireless connec- tion, he bought the domain name bored- atbutler.com, for nine dollars, and built a simple Web page consisting of a post box-where visitors can write public messages-and a note of introduction: "Post your thoughts. . . but keep it I " anonymous. That night, Pappas put up a few flyers. By morning, the site had accumulated more than two thousand messages. (One of the first: "I'm a big chubby boy look- ing for a big chubby zebra.") Pappas has since graduated and relocated to Silicon Valley, and he has expanded the "bored at" empire to include eleven schools. From Brown (boredattherock): Annie Leibovitz is overrated. . . . Give me a camera, a beautiful well-known celebrity, and I'll give you a few good shots too. Gimme a break. Can someone help me find my virginity? I think I lost it in grad center last night FUCK, I left my coke outside the window to chill and it froze solid I am really tired I am really cold When's the housing lottery? From Princeton (boredatfirestone): Party in Frist and Firestone all night woo! ! You guys are boring. Anyone else hungover? In terms of volume, the Harvard board stands out. In five months, it has accumulated more than a hundred and seventy thousand posts-twice as many as the original version, at Columbia-for reasons that remain a mystery. "I wish I had an answer," Pappas said. "I can tell you that Christmas Day it had two thou- sand posts-isn't that strange?" But, he admitted, the Harvard site has a reputa- tion for posts that involve sex, often in and around the library. "I actually feel like boredatlamont is more effective in get- ting people to hook up than parties at Harvard," one user wrote on a recent night at 2:39 A.M. A few weeks ago, Andrew Fine, a Harvard sophomore, walked into a study area, and a post went up almost im- mediately: "Sigh I saw Andrew Fine today at Lamont. He was wearing a yel- low shirt and blackish jeans. How can someone look so good in such ordinary clothes." Fine, who wrote a Crimson col- umn criticizing the site ("Sad@Lamont" was the headline), said, "A friend e-mailed me and was, like, 'Someone's watching you in Lamont right now.' It's totally weird." Though Pappas says that writing about individuals is against the rules, he has a philosophical attitude to- ward the site's content: "If you give peo- ple the ability to say whatever they want, sometimes you'll get the most brilliant comments, things that you think be- long in a book somewhere. It's an infinite spectrum between extreme ignorance and extreme brilliance." At Harvard, however, not everyone agrees on the site's potential for profun- dity. Gordon Teskey, an English pro- fessor, wrote in an e-mail that he was in- terested in poetry but not, necessarily, in "typing by Harvard students." The poet Peter Richards grew nostalgic for a line he had once seen scrawled on a condom dispenser ("This gum tastes funny"). "It seems that ever since that ink/scratch- resistant paint for public bathrooms was invented, literary graffiti, or graffiti try- ing to be literary, has become a lost tradi- tion," he wrote. "So I don't know, maybe this site, with all its cruising, gripes, pro- nouncements, and happy anonymous filth and such, is partly in response to that . . " mIssIng venue. Presented with sample posts ("Classes suck," "Is Prince gay?"), Stephen Green- blatt, a professor who is the general edi- tor of "The Norton Anthology of En- glish Literature," was more optimistic. "There could well emerge, taken to- gether, a certain accidental prose-poetry out of these brief notes," he wrote. "But Shakespeare it ain't. The short lines re- mind me of certain Dada-like moments in early Harold Pinter-or, better still, Charles Mee." -Lizzie Widdicombe THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 5, 2007 37